


Embracing the Moon

by PureBatWings



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Lunar Eclipse, Lunarus, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Opposites Attract, Rare Pair, Severus Snape Lives, Sevuna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 08:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8742238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PureBatWings/pseuds/PureBatWings
Summary: Luna and Severus' friends understood, at least a little, when the improbable pair became not only probable but wedded.Usual legal disclaimers apply. Not my characters, not for money, no copyright infringement implied.





	

"Snakes and grims, Snape and Grim. Oh my, professor, he did try to kill you painfully..."

He felt his mangled throat get wrapped tightly with a scarf and his body raised with a Levicorpus spell and floated out into the chilly May evening.  
Try? he thought idly, I think the snake-faced bastard bloody well succeeded. It did seem an odd introduction to the afterlife, however.

"I should have guessed when I saw the pack of grims and heard a Banshee it meant nothing good," she added wistfully.

The young woman's voice was familiar. Not Trelawney, but as otherworldly... was she Ravenclaw... sixth year? It would come to him eventually, if he didn't die first, he thought, fading back into the blessed dark of unconsciousness.

((( ***(((***000***)))***)))

"And then we went from Sweden-- we never did see any Crumple Horned Snorkacks, alas-- to Amsterdam. It has a lot of lovely chi, Professor, all those canals, all nice and fresh, not stagnant energy like you have in Venice with that brackish water..."

"Harry and Ron and Hermione and Ginny say hello. Harry's lying low trying to avoid all the press. He did promise my father he'd do an interview with The Quibbler soon, however, so at least now we'll hear his version of killing Voldemort without Rita Skeeter's embellishments--"

He must have made some sound and movement because she stopped talking immediately. Good girl, he thought, you know when to be silent.

"Professor, are you coming out of your coma? Hang on, I'll let Madam Pomfrey know."

"Wah--"

He was slowly propped up against his pillows with a light levitation spell and a straw was placed at his lips. He sipped the water and carefully squinting, opened his eyes a little bit. There was the white of the infirmary walls, the silver of a hare patronus bounding off to fetch the matron and the paleness of his hands on the whiter sheets. Beside him perched someone with a silver-blond fall of hair-- Malfoy? --no, female-- and younger than Narcissa.

"Miss Lovegood?" he asked, befuddled as she patted his nearest hand comfortingly with her small soft hand.

"Ah Severus, good, you're back among the living!" said Poppy Pomfrey, and snatched up his wrist to take his pulse.

"Debatable if it's good, or I'm living," he protested dryly. He wanted more water, now.

"More water, sir?" said Luna politely and moved the glass under his nose.

"Mmm," he agreed and drank some more.

Poppy began to run various medical scans on him as his attention wavered.

"Stay awake a bit longer, sir. I'll tell you about the Japanese muggle researcher Masuru Emoto who exposed water to intoned words and how the ice crystals reflected the meanings in their shapes. I could see this having possibilities for your potions..."

Ridiculous, he thought as he lapsed into sleep. Potions was both an art and a subtle science, and that meant muggles and squibs could rarely produce elixirs...

((( ***(((***000***)))***)))

She came to visit him after supper each evening and brought her calm cheer and the latest information about how things and people were sorting themselves out after what was known as the Battle of Hogwarts. She brought him news of the Golden Trio-- Harry was apparently quite seriously courting Ginny, whom Luna considered one of her good friends. Neville Longbottom, slayer of Nagini, was sweet on the Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott.

At first her seemingly aimless gossip about former students drove him nearly crazy-- if he'd been a crueller man, he'd have hexed her. But something stayed his hand, beside the lack of a wand. It seemed being mean to her was too much like kicking a pet crup, a young one with a floppy pair of tails and wobbly legs it hadn't yet grown into. He didn't have lash out anymore since his two masters, light and dark, were dead and the need for malicious meanness to maintain his scary facade was no longer there.

Sometimes he wondered how much she really noticed, how much day to day realities affected her. She would wander the castle barefoot, uncaring of the granite floors underfoot. When he asked her why one day, she explained her housemates liked to steal her shoes, her jewelry, her mementos and books. She'd gotten good at recall charms, but it got tedious to put up with their childish pranks sometimes.

He didn't have a need to hurt her verbally-- she was his main distraction besides reading papers and muggle novels. He thought the snake venom or the coma might have permanently done his brain some harm-- he couldn't bring his thoughts to focus on journal articles for long, nor was he in the mood to pen poisonous and accurately incisive criticisms of others' conclusions in letters to the editor (for which he was justly infamous at Potioneers Quarterly).

((( ***(((***000***)))***)))

"You were gone part of last year, where were you?" he asked her one day, months into their ongoing conversation. They had talked about the Statutes of Secrecy, 101 uses for flobberworms, living or dead and places they wanted to see before they died, among dozens of other topics.

A shadow passed over her eyes. "Mr. Ollivander and I were in the Malfoy dungeons for some months. Dobby and Harry rescued us, but Dobby died. I remember you being there, using _Legilmens_ on me at one point."

He winced. He'd forgotten she was among Lucius' "house guests" of the Dark Lord. And yes, she'd been one of dozen of minds he'd tried to wring out information from about Harry's whereabouts in order to protect him as well as keep himself alive by reporting half-truths to Voldemort. Luna was one of the few from whom he had failed to obtain any useful information.

Entering her thoughts, he'd gotten first wrapped up by her memory of casting her patronus correctly for the first time, seeing the lithe form of a hare spring from her wand. And the memory of the hare led to connections in her mind--the rabbit in the moon, _Watership Down_ , the Japanese moon goddess, Blue Moons, calendars, the mysteries of Rhiannon and Astarte and Selene and eclipses and Moon Frogs and how a wizard brought them to earth and the Triple goddess and Robert Graves and _Goodnight Moon_ , and spring high tides which brought dangerous floods and... with a gasp he'd yanked himself back from her mind before he was caught in the mental undertow of dozens of lunar connections and associations and washed out to sea, never to be seen again outside the walls of St. Mungo's Janus Thickey ward for the mentally ill.

There was ample reason why her housemates called her Loony Lovegood, he thought, remembering what gossip he'd heard. He'd never encountered a mind like hers before or since. She knew fully as much about magical creatures as he did about potions, but their minds organized it in categories and ways utterly different from each other's.

"What did you and Garrick Ollivander discuss?"

"Wandlore mostly, and my theories about dryads affecting wood's humidity and how that might impact the electromagnetic aspects of thamaturgical systems. He gifted me with my new wand." She held it out to him, trustingly, hilt first. He stared at her, you didn't just casually pass over your wand to just anyone.

"Are you sure?" he asked hoarsely. She was as innocent as a unicorn foal in some ways.

She nodded and smiled and pressed it into his hand, covering his fingers with hers. His hand closed over the unusual wand and he closely examined it before passing it back with his thanks for her trust.

"It's got a unicorn hair core with willow and yew carved in spirals bound around each other with multicolored niobium wire and mermaid hair."

He understood about half of that, she mixed muggle terms with magical theory with aplomb, uncaring if her listener was following her train of thought or not, or suspected that her train had derailed and was heading across country as the crow flies.

"I'm very sorry I had to do that to you, invade your mind-- Voldemort's orders," he said finally, in a low shamed voice.

"Being cold and hungry was worse, " she said, matter of fact. "You at least were skilled like an assassin's stiletto going into flesh, not a cudgel to the brain." She had a way of stating unpleasant truths lodged in the middle of some vague comments that could be quite disconcerting. "I'm not sure why the Death Eaters didn't rape me in prison," she continued, "except perhaps I was being saved as a reward, a trophy wife for someone, when Voldemort won and they needed to produce lots of Pureblood babies."

She changed the subject. "When did you see your first thestral?"

He found himself telling her about his father's death when he was thirteen, and how utterly relieved he was to find Tobias' neck broken and the man dead in a heap at the bottom of the brick stairs to their home one morning. His body was stiff. He'd returned from the pub far too late on a cold icy night and stumbling drunk, had managed to kill himself falling.

"My mother, Pandora, blew herself up when I was nine. Potion brewing gone wrong, she put lettuce that was supposed to go into our salad bowl for lunch in the wrong container-- I ducked behind a table instinctively where I'd been de-veining Shrimp Orchids and peeling Dirigible Plums for lunch or I'd have gotten more than a glancing blow of a stirring rod to the head."

She smiled at him. "We mirror each other, you know-- bullied by our houses, mocked, under-estimated in our magical power."

"More like my dark to your light, Miss Lovegood."

"We've been friends for months, I'm Luna and to me you're Severus, agreed?" she said, holding out her hand.

"Agreed," he said, slowly, allowing her plenty of time to withdraw her hand before they shook.

His hand engulfed her much warmer small one, and her rabbit shaped charm on her bracelet scampered against his skin and then, shockingly, humped briefly against his wrist.

"Ah, Leveret likes you! That's auspicious." And when he'd asked her why, she'd refused to answer and told him instead about how Nargles were real as well as tragically misunderstood.

((( ***(((***000***)))***)))

They'd continued their friendship as his recovery progressed. Their conversations covered dozens of topics as he moved from the infirmary (at last!) into a cottage at the edge of Hogsmeade he had bought with the thousands of galleons that a grateful Wizarding nation had given the turncoat spy. The foul murderer of Dumbledore was now turned, hocus pocus, in the media into the self-sacrificing hero thanks to Harry Potter's relentless public relations campaign.

Once Hogwarts was rebuilt and he had the energy to stay awake more than five hours at a time, he had no desire to teach again. His potions were still of excellent quality, all agreed, but his letters to the editor lacked some edge, his sarcastic snark was a touch more philosophical. Many were surprised to hear the reason for the change, even though it was apparent to their observant mutual friends and those with the gift of Sight.

The moon has her dark side and Luna's perfect dark half was Severus.

Luna and Severus' friends understood, at least a little, when the improbable pair became not only probable, but wedded. There is no yin without yang, the two melding, mixing, flowing back and forth in a give and take like a conversation between two people who have come to know each other well and won't run out of things to say to each other, even after years.

The bride wore a silver spangled gown that had been last seen at a Slug Club gala at Hogwarts, and ice beetle wing earrings and the groom wore his usual black robes, with a silvery grey piping as an accent. Their rings were intertwined black and silver metal. Like snakes of a caduceus, Severus said. Like the loops of lunar eclipses cycling every nineteen years, said Luna.

The pair danced barefoot at the reception to songs Wizarding and Muggle that had the word moon in the title. Luna had cast the horary chart for a perfect wedding time.

Severus added a good luck potion to the wine and another potion that augmented the vision of one's third eye to the frosting on the wedding cake so that all the guests might share their joy, and for one night, maybe see things Luna's way.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm tempted to put together a song list of the Muggle Tunes-- Van Morrison's Moon Dance, Cat Stevens' Moonshadow, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and there's a sad song by Mary Chapin Carpenter "Luna's Gone" about a lost cat. This was written during the moon waxing crescent in Aquarius...


End file.
